


And Explode Into Space

by biichan



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-05 00:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna thumbs a ride. (Features the perils of trans-temporal dress shopping!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Explode Into Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Netgirl_y2k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/gifts).



> Many thanks to ionlylurkhere for beta-reading.

At least she wasn't missing the wedding of someone she actually _remembered_.

It wasn't much of a silver lining, but Donna was looking for any sort of consolation she could find. Her mother's car (which she'd borrowed for the day) had suffered a punture on the motorway, halfway to the Dover beach where the wedding was being held, and the spare tyre was mysteriously missing from the boot. Even worse, her bloody mobile wasn't getting any sort of signal, so it was no use trying to call AA for help or Martha Jones to tell her she'd be late.

Donna had met Martha for the first time during her missing eighteen months. The details of how were sketchy—classified information, Martha had explained, awkwardly (she worked at some sort of weird government agency)—but they'd evidently become friendly enough for Martha to have sent her a wedding invitation. Donna had rung her up at the RSVP number, prepared to give the usual speech—the one that started out with _I know you know me, but I don't remember you_, the one she'd already given half-a-dozen times before, mostly to conspiracy theorists for some reason. Martha had listened quietly until Donna was done talking and had told her to come anyway. And then had invited her to lunch that Friday.

Lunch had gone well and the coffees and lunches they'd had together over the months to follow had been rather fun. They'd had to stay away from talking about anything related to Martha's work, of course, but there were always wedding preparations to discuss and, strangely enough, Harry Potter to geek out about. (Donna didn't remember being such a hardcore fan of it _before_ the amnesia, though of course she'd read it—she didn't live under a _rock_—but the last book had come out during her missing months, so maybe that had something to do with it.) Not to mention that Martha knew some of the best (cheap) restaurants around. Even if Donna didn't remember Martha, she _liked_ her. She'd even been looking forward to the wedding, which Donna didn't even _understand_, considering how the massive and possibly amnesia-causing disaster that had been her _own_ nuptials should have put her off weddings for all time.

But it hadn't. Somehow, it hadn't.

Maybe she could try thumbing a ride. It was better than trying to walk to the nearest village—and presumably the nearest pay phone—in these shoes.

* * *

The woman's name was Ace and she had a custom motorbike. Donna would have rather been picked up by someone with a car, but it had been over an hour and (as her mum always said, _constantly_) beggars couldn't be choosers. She supposed Ace wasn't a bad sort, though, even if she did go around in head-to-toe leather. Ace had even been able to secure Martha and Tom's toaster to the back of the bike so that it wouldn't fall off, which was something of a relief. It would be bloody embarrassing, after all, to show up at the wedding without the gift. (Even though she'd be missing the wedding itself altogether by now. She'd still probably be able to make the reception. She hoped.)

Ace's extra helmet had some weirdly familiar circular symbol on it. It absolutely clashed with Donna's dress, but since the other helmet clashed even worse, she put it on without protest.

"So when did you say you had to be at the wedding?" Ace yelled.

"Two o'clock," Donna yelled back.

"Dover, right?" Ace yelled. "I can do that!" And then she did—something, Donna didn't know what—and there was a sound like the universe being sucked down a pipe and suddenly everything was _blue_. Blue and with weird streaks of light everywhere and the motorway was _gone_—it was bloody _gone_.

"What the hell do you think you're _doing_?" Donna practically screamed in Ace's ear.

Ace laughed. "Don't worry! It's perfectly safe."

"Maybe if you're from _Mars_," Donna snarled. Which, of course, was when the big fucking dinosaur decided to make its appearance right fucking in front of them.

Donna did what anyone would have done in her circumstances. She fainted.

* * *

She awoke to the smell of burning wood. Someone had draped a heavy leather coat on top of her. Hadn't she had a leather coat of her own once? Only it hadn't been hers originally, it had been someone else's—a man she'd once known—and she'd worn it for remembrance. Except she couldn't remember the man, couldn't remember what had happened to the coat. Maybe it had never existed.

Maybe the big fucking dinosaur hadn't either.

Wait a minute... big fucking dinosaur?

"Ace?" Donna croaked, pushing herself upright, so she could at least sit. The ground beneath her was hard, dirty and just a little bit damp. Her dress was probably _ruined_. "What the hell just happened?"

"You fainted," Ace said quietly, sitting down next to her. "I stopped the bike. We're a bit off course now, sorry."

Donna frowned. "And the big fucking dinosaur?"

"Probably still in the time vortex," Ace said after a moment. "It's where they live and all."

"Time vortex. You mean that blue stuff?"

Ace nodded.

Donna blinked tiredly. "Are you trying to tell me that your bike is a bloody _time machine_?"

Ace grinned. "A simple one, but yeah. I nicked it from the Time Agency."

"There's a Time Agency," Donna said, tiredly.

"Yeah. Well, more orgy than agency, but they supposedly do their part to preserve the time line when they're not busy shagging."

That was possibly more than Donna really needed to know. "So you're what? A freelance time traveller?"

Ace nodded. "I used to travel with this friend of mine, but... well. Things happened. Afterward I just wanted to go it alone for a while." She cocked her head to the side. "You're taking this better than I thought."

Donna frowned. It was true. She _was_ taking this remarkably well. Shouldn't she be screaming her head off by now? "Something happened to me two years ago. At least, I think it was two years ago. Sometimes it feels like longer, even though I _know_ when it happened. Except I don't know what happened. I don't remember it and my family doesn't want to talk about it. And maybe they're right. My dad died. I don't remember him dying. I don't remember _anything_ between when I was walking down the aisle and six months ago. My friend Nerys said I got beamed up by Martians and some cute bloke who looked like a weasel—don't ask me how he could be cute _and_ look like a weasel, that's Nerys for you—anyway, she told me that Cute Weasel Bloke brought me back and there was some weird shite with Robot Santas and the military exploding a Christmas star. And Lance—he was my fiancé—Nerys says he skipped town afterward, but I didn't care because I'd gone all X-Files by then. Which is ridiculous, because I never even _believed_ any of that X-Files shite before I almost got married, but maybe it _is_ real if you've got a time machine bike, maybe it's _all_ real and that's what I can't remember and—"

Ace was staring at her. Donna shut her mouth.

"Gordon Bennett," said Ace. "You said that all in one breath?"

Donna shrugged.

Ace sighed softly and took Donna's hand. Donna let her. "You've got artron energy sticking to you," Ace said after a long moment. "I mean, you had it before you climbed onto my bike. I don't know what you've forgotten. But whatever it was, it was real. And so is this. Martians are real, time travel is real, and so are a lot of things you probably never believed in before."

"Are—are you a Martian?" Donna asked hesitantly.

Ace laughed. "Me? No way. I grew up in Perivale. I got beamed up myself, back in the eighties. Well, it was more that I got sucked up. Time storm. Long story. Anyhow, real Martians don't really look human. I mean, they're bipedal and all, but they're actually these really tall lizard blokes in green armor."

Donna found herself smiling. "You've met some?"

"One or two," Ace admitted. "You might have met some too, you know."

Donna nodded slowly. "Maybe I did." She looked around. "Where are we, anyway?"

"A cave," said Ace.

Donna rolled her eyes. "I can _see_ that, Einstein."

Ace shrugged. "It's the wrong question, anyway. You should be asking when, not where."

"Fine then," said Donna, "_when_ are we?"

"Third century BC," Ace said. "And before you say _anything_, remember that you fainted and I had to stop the bike before you fell off."

"_Fine_," said Donna, wondering how a quick trip to Dover at two o'clock meant Ace would have had to go past wherever they were twenty-three hundred years ago, "but you're buying me a new dress. This one's a wreck."

* * *

It wasn't so simple as just getting on Ace's bike and riding off to find a dress shop, however. There were still the big fucking dinosaurs in the time vortex to deal with. Ace claimed that they were essentially harmless and only ate people who interfered with their own pasts. Donna didn't trust them one bit. She absolutely refused to stay in the time vortex once she saw one and as a result they ended up making quite a lot of little stops here and there.

Occasionally they blew things up. Ace seemed to enjoy it. Donna didn't mind, because most of their little stops somehow seemed to involve people wanting to kill them.

Very few of the little stops had dress shops, unfortunately, and the ones that did—such as the one in Ancient Egypt, where they'd spent some time browsing after fighting off a half-dozen disgruntled mummies with Ace's home made explosives—usually didn't have what Donna was looking for. Either the dresses were ugly (pretty much everything that was on offer in early seventeenth-century Holland—Donna _hated_ ruffs) or they were cursed (the otherwise gorgeous kimono they'd found in pre-Shogunate Edo) or they were bloody _transparent_ for some weird reason (that would be the one in Ancient Egypt.) It was enough to make a girl throw in the bloody towel.

She said as much to Ace as they scrambled back to Ace's bike with a horde of screaming Cossacks behind them. (Just her luck—even worse, the Ukrainian frocks had looked _horrible_ on her.)

"What about your friend?" Ace said, grabbing a canister of Nitro Five (or whatever it was called) from her bag and chucking it at the Head Cossack's head. "Won't she miss seeing you at the wedding?"

Donna grabbed her helmet from the back of the bike and jammed it on her head. "Probably. But she's in special ops. She'd understand."

Ace swung her leg over the seat. "One more place. I've got a good feeling about this one."

* * *

"So," Ace said, almost too casually, "what do you think?"

Donna was grinning from ear to ear. So were all three of her reflections in the change-room mirror. "It's _perfect_. How did you know I always wanted to be a flapper?"

Ace shrugged. "I just thought you'd look good as one."

"I do," Donna said, spinning around on her toes. "I bloody well do." She hugged Ace gleefully. "Thank you."

Ace grinned and hugged her back. "Are you going to get a bob, then?"

Donna laughed. "Nah. It's not worth it just for one wedding. I'll pin it up or something. What about you, though?"

Ace blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Well," said Donna, "you're going as my date, right?"

Ace stared at her. Oh shite. She'd forgotten to ask her, hadn't she? She'd gotten so caught up in the dress shopping and hand-holding and running and blowing things up that she'd forgotten and now Ace thought she was this insane lesbian _lunatic_ and would run off like Lance did and leave her _stranded_ in 1925 and—

"Sure," said Ace and she grinned. "I might wear a tuxedo, though. Flapper dresses don't come in leather."

"Neither do tuxedos," Donna felt compelled to point out.

"Details," said Ace and she kissed her.

Donna thought she could get used to this time traveling adventure business. It beat temp work to hell and back.

* * *

Martha was a beautiful bride. Her groom wasn't bad looking himself, but Donna had seen pictures of him before and thought he looked better with stubble. Another one of Donna's new friends that she couldn't remember meeting—the reporter with all the kids following her around—caught the bouquet and some gangly kid in a bowtie and tweed caught the garter, which seemed to amuse his two companions to no end. (That same kid in tweed spent most of the reception staring at Donna and Ace, like he'd never seen two women on a date before. It was bloody irritating.)

"So where's the honeymoon?" Donna asked curiously, sipping delicately at her latest drink. It was one of the bright-colored fruity ones, the kind with a kick.

"Florana," Martha said, radiantly happy. "A friend's giving us a lift."

"That's in Spain, right?" Donna guessed.

"Something like that," Martha said. "What about you and Ace?"

"Me and Ace?" Donna grinned. "We're going _everywhere_."

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Netgirl_y2k as part of the DW Femslash Ficathon.
> 
> **Prompt:**  
> "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." - Douglas Adams


End file.
